Superman Saves Children And Drunks

Look, I’m not gonna blow sunshine up your ass: it’s St. Patrick’s Day, we live in Boston, and I am Irish. I have my second pint of Guinness sitting in front of me, and we are foregoing the traditional corned beef and cabbage gut bomb in favor of a light salmon supper. These circumstances, when combined, mean that my command of the written English language has about 45 minutes to live.

So let’s all give thanks that the good folks at CorridorDigital have access to a Superman suit, some actors, a green screen, and a jacked-up camera drone. Because they have combined those circumstances to create a three-minute video of what it might look like if Superman strapped a Go-Pro camera to his head and flew around saving people and stomping bad guys.

It’s actually a really cool first-person view of what it might be like to be Superman flying around the landscape, and I am going to post it now. Because if I wait about an hour to post and view it, it is good enough that I will become motion sick, and dark ale will erupt from places that it should not. At least not before closing time. And you can check it out after the jump.

…No, The Other Blue Wire

We are performing a whole bunch of long overdue site maintenance today. So if you see strange happenings and weird effects from time to time this afternoon, please forgive us.

We will be back to our regularly scheduled programming this evening or tomorrow at the latest.

It’s All Over Bar The Shouting: San Diego Comic-Con 2014 Registration Over; Sold Out

So public registration for this year’s San Diego Comic-Con occurred today, and luckily, we did not need to be a part of it. As attendees last year, we were eligible for the pre-registration that took place in early February, and were fortunate enough to be able to score tickets for the full convention in fairly short order.

So today I was able to watch the madness, desperation, excessive glee and futile cursing happen by way of watching the #SDCC hashtag feed on Twitter, and it looked like a very similar experience to the one we went through for the pre-registration, albeit this time, the entire free fucking world could be involved. I saw a healthy number of tweets from people in Australia and New Zealand complaining that they needed to be up at 4 a.m. local time… and yet no complaints that they needed to Raid away swarms of hairy poisonous spiders to get to their computers to try to register. You will see me dead before you see me in Australia wearing less than a beekeeper’s suit and a Ghostbuster’s proton pack is what I’m saying, but that’s not the point right now.

The point is that we saw the normal complaints that one sees on Twitter during SDCC registration:

• The Web site told me not to refresh, but I did, and now I’m at the end of the line! SDCC sucks!
• The Web site told me not to refresh and I didn’t, but I think if I did, I’d be at the front of the line! SDCC sucks!
• I tried to register from an iPad at Starbucks and my Internet quit! SDCC sucks!
• I forgot about registration until 9:02 Pacific Time and when I logged in I was at the back of the line! SDCC sucks!
• I’ve never tried to register for Comic-Con before, have made no plans on how to succeed at this task, and can’t understand why I can’t just do this in ten seconds even though there are thousands and thousands of other people trying to buy the same ticket as me! I should receive preferential treatment! SDCC sucks!

The fact of the matter is that attending SDCC is, and has been since at least 2009, serious fucking business. I have written before that my co-Editor Amanda and I book backup hotel rooms in August of the year preceding SDCC. When we need to register, we do it from two separate locations, both with independent power supplies and wired Internet connections, and maintain constant communication to increase our odds of success. And we have made the pact that, so long as we can obtain at least Thursday and Sunday passes, we will attend SDCC, if only to make us eligible for whatever pre-registration is available the following year, so we get two bites at the registration apple. And I have said before that this might sound obsessive, but there are two types of people in this world: people who scoff at making paranoid, obsessive and redundant plans regarding SDCC registration, housing and transportation, and people who actually attend Comic-Con.

I Am The Face: Matt Ryan As John Constantine, or: Give Me A Cigarette or I’ll Cut You

So back when the TV pilot for a possible Constantine NBC series was announced, we kinda ignored it because it was impossible to tell, at the time, whether DC and Warner Bros. planned to do a real Hellblazer-ish show, or, based on John Constantine co-creator Steve Bissette’s assertion that he wasn’t getting paid because the show was spun out of the original Constantine movie deal, if we were getting a warmed-over TV version of the Keanu Reeves movie bomb.

Let me start by making a correction: at the time Bissette made his assertion, we stated that Reeves’s movie “sucked out loud.” We have since rewatched that movie, thanks to TiVo’s automatically recorded “suggestions,” and I feel safe in saying that, despite my memories of 2005, the movie does not suck out loud. It merely sucks. But it still doesn’t put forth a character that I want to see on a weekly basis.

We were somewhat comforted by the recent announcement that Matt Ryan, a Welshman (which is close to London, right?), was cast as John Constantine… but only a bit. Because we checked out Ryan’s IMDB profile, and found that his highest profile gigs before this were in Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake… where Ryan played the pivotal role of “Junkie #2,” and in American TV drama Criminal Minds, where he played the high profile role of, “Someone my parents have seen in Criminal Minds, since no one younger than 50 watches that show. Seriously, it’s the J.A.G. of serial killer shows.”

Look: we John Constantine fans don’t ask for much. When it comes to Constantine, we want four things:

1. An English accent
2. Blonde hair
3. A tan trenchcoat, and:
4. A cigarette.

Somehow, the Constantine movie fucked 3/4ths of these simple elements. However, Geoff Johns Tweeted the first official photo of Ryan as Constantine and… Goddamn.

This photo has 3/4ths of what we want right… the exact opposite 3/4ths of Reeves’s version. And you can check it out after the jump.

Zachary Levi Wants You To Pay Him $5 – An Alternative For When You, Inevitably, Can’t Get Into Comic-Con

Well, folks. It’s that magical time of year again. Open registration for tickets to the 2014 San Diego International Comic-Con will be this Saturday. The waiting room opens at 7am Pacific Time; that’s 10am for those of you on the non-earthquake and wildfire prone coast. You can check out their official blog for more detail. As with the preregistration sale, the EPIC Web site will begin organizing those waiting into random groups for ticket sales, so, in theory you can log in at 7am or 8:59am and supposedly have the same shot at getting through to tickets. We look forward to reading your digital tales of woe beginning around 10am PT, if last time was any kind of guide, on Twitter.

Meanwhile, there continue to be tons of free events taking place that week to attend as a supplement…or to soothe your heartbreak when you don’t get SDCC tickets. One of these is Nerd HQ, an event that will be taking place at Petco Park at the same time as the convention. Nerd HQ is produced by Nerd Machine, which is run by Zachary Levi. Here, let him tell you about it:

You can find more details about it over on his Indiegogo page. But, essentially, contribute $5 or $1000 and get your name on the Nerd HQ Wall Of Honor. All things are equal in the great Nerd Machine and lead to a great fund raising opportunity for Operation Smile.

Issue Numbering Is A Flat Circle

Okay, I might be ready to check out of the whole Marvel Now initiative. Because this Web site is about two and a half years old, and I believe that this week’s Secret Avengers #1 is the third Goddamned Secret Avengers #1 in that amount of time. Plus, there’s yet another first issue of a comic book with the word “Avengers” in the title, the 14th or 15th third issue of a Wolverine book since last year’s SDCC, and I think the (literally) tenth version of a Captain Marvel #1.

Look, I get that Marvel made the conscious decision, in the face of the initial success of DC’s New 52 reboot in 2011, to do their own rolling “reboot” where the characters stay in continuity but they can renumber to a first issue whenever they need to temporarily bump circulation back up to the point where Ike Perlmutter will give the creative team the key to the men’s room toilet paper dispenser.

I remember being a kid with a 75-cent a week allowance and becoming giddy with excitement whenever I found a new first issue. I am now 42 years old, with an income large enough that I could easily buy any of those 70s first issues, and, having seen my second first issue of Wolverine in less than a year, I now feel a certain amount of comfort in seeing triple-digit issue numbers from Robert Kirkman comics.

But that’s the cool thing about comics: even though I am a little tired of being spoon-fed first issues, at least they mean new creative teams. Combine that with a couple of new high-numbered issues to remind me that this is, after all, long-term episodic storytelling, and it means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

So yeah, we have a few new first issues, but we also have a new issue of the Mighty Avengers (which is my current bar-none favorite Avengers title), a new Hawkeye, a new Batman, the final issue of Frank Miller’s and Steven Grant’s Robocop: Last Stand (featuring the real 1987 Robocop), and a bunch of other cool stuff!

And even though I’m a little tired of these forced series renumberings, new comics equals good. And whether it’s an issue #1 or issue #500, before we can talk about any of them, we need time to read them. So while that happens…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!

Full Frontal Flash – Full Look At The New Flash Costume

A couple weeks back, we shared with you Geoff Johns’s tweet about the costume for the new Flash on the WB spinoff show of the same name. Well, DC Comics and the WB have now released a full length look at the new costume, as modeled by Grant Gustin:

Hermetically sealed for a woman’s pleasure.

More information after the jump.

Batman Beneath: Batwing #29 Review

So I haven’t written about Batwing for a while. Even though it has remained on my pull list, I had kinda tuned out of Batwing for a while. It survived my first cut of books from the initial New 52, unlike real stinkers like Hawk & Dove and The Savage Hawkman, and it never really got bad, but the whole former child soldier of African warlords angle never clicked all that well with me. Not because it was badly executed, but because it always reminded me of Joshua Dysart’s The Unknown Soldier, and that was a comparison that, when it comes to harrowing drama, a book about a guy in a Bat suit was going to lose.

Since writers Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti took the book over, those issues have vanished. We’ve got a different guy in the Batwing suit, a Batwing suit that is basically the Batman Beyond suit, and we’re back in Gotham City, giving us a little distance from the whole Batman Incorporated conceit that almost forced the international feel. And what we wind up with is a version of Batman Beyond, with a young, brash guy being mentored by Batman in the most dangerous city in the world. And that works for me; I don’t have an original Bruce Timm Batman Beyond sketch and the Batman Beyond Black And White statue on my mantle because I don’t like that kind of story.

And in Batwing #29, Gray and Palmiotti put together a mix of tones that is a little weird, but generally pretty fun. There is urban horror and real terrible stakes to what’s happening to Luke Fox and his family, horror befitting a modern Batman family comic. And yet it is tempered with big, silly comic book-y ideas, like an unknown underground city beneath Gotham, populated with homeless geeks in Egyptian costumes and giant monsters. It’s a weird mix, but it generally worked for me, and I found it really pretty entertaining.

Provided I turned some parts of my brain off.

Time Travel: Extended Guardians of The Galaxy Interview With James Gunn, Chris Pratt and Kevin Feige

Boy, I sure love it when we switch to Daylight Savings Time here in the United States! It sure is awesome to go to bed drunk on a Saturday night and then wake up on a Sunday morning with absolutely no concept about what time it really is! I mean, here it is after 8 p.m., and every sip of beer feels like I’m drinking with my Cheerios! And the Crisis On Infinite Midlives mascot, Parker the Kitten is really enjoying not knowing whether he should nap, eat dinner, or just continue clawing at my ankles like they’re two animal control guys with fists full of ketamine and eyes full of loneliness!

Long story short: it is a terrible kind of day to attempt anything remotely resembling complicated analysis or in-depth reflection. It is, however, a good day for a long-ish video with an interview with some jokes, some entertaining lines, and a few new details about a much-anticipated genre property.

Say no more: yesterday, Marvel Studios President of production Kevin Feige, director James Gunn and actor Chris Pratt sat down for a half-hour interview with AMC Theaters about Guardians of The Galaxy. And there’s not a ton of new information about the flick in the interview – everyone was sitting there with Kevin Feige after all, and I think we all know that the Disney board of directors has given him the authority to respond to the release of spoilers with extreme sanction – but there are a few tidbits. Such as the fact that Gunn still coming up with ideas for a possible post-credits scene (c’mon, Nova…), and based on a couple of sidelong glances, I wouldn’t be surprised to see an appearance by Cosmo somewhere in the flick.

And I know we post a lot of videos on this site, but seriously: this was one we threw up on the big screen to watch all the way through. The interviewer is, for a change for this kind of thing, at least generally familiar with the comics behind the movie, and Pratt and Gunn are just a lot of fun to watch. Check this one out, after the jump.

Everybody Dies: Afterlife With Archie #4 Review

This isn’t going to be a long review, because it really doesn’t have to be… but I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that I originally picked up the first issue of Afterlife With Archie as a goof. It looked like a zombie movie for slightly older kids, with art by one of my current favorite artists, and it turned out to be more fun than I anticipated from an Archie book.

I picked up the second issue because I liked the first, and I liked it a lot more than the first, because it seemed that writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa was using the pretext of a zombie apocalypse to peel back the all-American veneer of Riverdale and examine a suburb with some dark secrets, kinda like the way David Lynch did in Twin Peaks.

We are now at the fourth issue. And this little book that I initially assumed would be a moderately dark and PG-13 violent horror-ish story for kids has gone completely and totally off the fucking rails. In a good way.

This Archie comic features, along with the ongoing zombie apocalypse, a family pet dying, incest and parricide. Let me repeat that: dead pet, brother / sister love, and parental murder. In Riverdale. From the Archie comics. In an Archie comic.

This makes Ed Brubaker’s Archie riff in Criminal: The Last of The Innocents, where the Archie analogue was a degenerate gambler and the Jughead analogue was a junkie, look damn near quaint.